The number of children is not growing any longer in the world. We are still debating peak oil, but we have definitely reached peak child.
I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.
Beyond 2050 the world population may start to decrease if women across the world will have, on average, less than 2 children. But that decrease will be slow.
Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books.
The database hugging in public institutions is hampering innovation.
There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.
Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.
The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.
I want people, when they realize they have been wrong about the world, to feel not embarrassment, but that childlike sense of wonder, inspiration, and curiosity that I remember from the circus, and that I still get every time I discover I have been wrong: “Wow, how is that even possible?
The macho values that are found today in many Asian and African countries, these are not Asian values, or African values. They are not Muslim values. They are not Eastern values. They are patriarchal values like those found in Sweden only 60 years ago, and with social and economic progress they will vanish, just as they did in Sweden. They are not unchangeable.
Look for systems, not heroes.
There was a balance. It wasn’t because humans lived in balance with nature. Humans died in balance with nature.
Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless – in short, more dramatic – than it really is.
Remember: things can be bad, and getting better.
Look for causes, not villains.
You should not expect the media to provide you with a fact-based worldview any more than you would think it reasonable to use a set of holiday snaps of Berlin as your GPS system to help you navigate around the city.
Being intelligent – being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize – is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.
When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.
The only proven method for curbing population growth is to eradicate extreme poverty.
The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want.